"Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process"
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Piaget’s line has the quiet edge of a provocation: if you think science is a collection of “facts,” you’re already doing it wrong. By stripping scientific thought of the “momentary” and the “static,” he pushes against the museum-version of knowledge - tidy exhibits, labeled and sealed - and replaces it with something messier, closer to growth than to storage. Science, in this framing, isn’t a snapshot; it’s a moving system that revises itself under pressure.
The intent is deeply Piagetian. As a psychologist who mapped how children build understanding through stages, Piaget treats thinking as construction, not reception. “Process” signals that intelligence isn’t measured by what you can recite but by how you adapt: testing, failing, accommodating, reorganizing. The subtext is a rebuke to authoritarian certainty, including the classroom kind. If scientific thought is a process, then pedagogy that rewards memorization over inquiry is anti-scientific by design.
Context matters here: Piaget worked in a 20th century defined by upheaval in both physics and psychology. Relativity and quantum mechanics had already shown that even bedrock concepts can be reconfigured; behaviorism was trying to turn the mind into a black box. Piaget’s insistence on process threads a needle between them: rigorous, but not reductive; systematic, but not frozen.
The line also doubles as a moral claim about humility. “Process” implies provisionality, and provisionality is what keeps science from calcifying into doctrine - a warning that remains useful whenever “science” gets wielded as a blunt instrument rather than practiced as a method.
The intent is deeply Piagetian. As a psychologist who mapped how children build understanding through stages, Piaget treats thinking as construction, not reception. “Process” signals that intelligence isn’t measured by what you can recite but by how you adapt: testing, failing, accommodating, reorganizing. The subtext is a rebuke to authoritarian certainty, including the classroom kind. If scientific thought is a process, then pedagogy that rewards memorization over inquiry is anti-scientific by design.
Context matters here: Piaget worked in a 20th century defined by upheaval in both physics and psychology. Relativity and quantum mechanics had already shown that even bedrock concepts can be reconfigured; behaviorism was trying to turn the mind into a black box. Piaget’s insistence on process threads a needle between them: rigorous, but not reductive; systematic, but not frozen.
The line also doubles as a moral claim about humility. “Process” implies provisionality, and provisionality is what keeps science from calcifying into doctrine - a warning that remains useful whenever “science” gets wielded as a blunt instrument rather than practiced as a method.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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